


Make Your Wish

by thatgirl_youknowtheone



Category: Original - Fandom
Genre: Genie - Freeform, I don’t think I could actually write that shit damn, I mean the child abuse is definite too, Implied Child Abuse, Suicidal Ideation, Wishes, but it’s only mentioned not shown, definite child neglect, fairytale, part of my fairytales series, the genie of the lamp - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 12:07:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17918516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatgirl_youknowtheone/pseuds/thatgirl_youknowtheone
Summary: “Um, I wish I’d never been born please.” said the girl, confident and straightforward, her eyes locked solidly on his.“Uhm, excuse me?” The Genie must have had some lamp oil stuck in his ear. “You didn’t just ask me to kill you right? I mean y’all should know the basic rules by now, I don’t kill, I can’t change someone else’s free will, and I don’t bring people back from the dead. Like, even Disney got that shit right.”





	Make Your Wish

**Author's Note:**

> Make sure you read the tags guys, got some dark themes here.

“I only have one wish.” Said the girl.

The Genie stifled a heavy sigh, this was obviously going to be a difficult one, either it was going to be some kind of ridiculous naive ‘world peace’ wish, or she was going to come out with one of his favourite loopholes like ‘I wish you would grant ALL of my wishes!’

He missed the simple days where people just wished for money and power, he had a million tricks stashed up his sleeve for those, kids these days all thought they were too clever, and it just made his job all the more difficult.

One glance around her somewhat messy bedroom filled with assorted shiny knickknacks and candles told him she may be the peace on earth type, although even he had to admit sometimes it was hard to tell what would come out of anyone’s mouth.

He’d heard some dark shit from a seven year old once, wishes like those could really change a man. Come to think of it, this girl couldn’t be all that much older, five years at MOST.

The Genie cracked his knuckles and stretched his neck in anticipation.

“Alright honey, what you want, lay it on me.” he said, feeling resigned.

The girl was biting her lip, it looked rough already, the Genie suspected this was a long term habit of hers. She was kinda scrawny, a little plain looking, didn’t seem to take care of her appearance that much. Oh god he hoped this was just a make over wish, consequences for those were easy pickings.

“Um, I wish I’d never been born please.” said the girl, confident and straightforward, her eyes locked solidly on his.

“Uhm, excuse me?” The Genie must have had some lamp oil stuck in his ear. “You didn’t just ask me to kill you right? I mean y’all should know the basic rules by now, I don’t kill, I can’t change someone else’s free will, and I don’t bring people back from the dead. Like, even Disney got that shit right.”

“I know,” she squeaked, “but that’s why I asked to have never been born, so you aren’t killing anyone. I’ll just never have existed in the first place.” she smiled, a tiny nervous smile.

It was unnerving.

“Bitch, why the hell you wanna die?” The Genie was baffled, absolutely baffled. How exactly was he supposed to spin a consequence on never having been born? She was practically doing his job for him!

“I’m just, kind of a nuisance to everyone? But all my friends keep telling me if I kill myself that they’ll be sad and they’ll miss me, I know they’ll be better off without me since all I do is just, weigh them down with my problems. But I figured, if they never knew me to begin with, they won’t be sad at all if I disappeared. Does... does that make sense? I think it makes sense.”

She trailed off, seemingly thinking it over to herself before filling in for The Genie’s stunned silence.

“Is this really the first time you’ve heard a wish like that?” she asked, curious.

“Uh, YES. OF COURSE IT IS. Most people are interested in one or more of three things.” he counted along on his fingers as he listed, “Money, power, and sex. Every wish I have ever granted has fallen into one of those categories in one obscure way or another, hell most of the people I get asked to kill are ex-lovers.”

The Genie rubbed a hand over his bald head, at a loss for what to say next. This just wasn’t right, people don’t wish for selfless things, not TRULY selfless things. There was always a catch, some greedy agenda hidden beneath the charitable act.

He couldn’t find one for this girl though. How the fuck do you get something selfish out of never having been born? Unless...

Oh, no wait, he got it.

He took a better assessment of the girl’s surroundings.

There was noise coming from another room, it had been going on for a while but was starting to raise in volume. Yelling, swearing, something fragile smashing against a hard surface, clearly a hostile environment.

The place reeked of cigarettes, unwashed clothes and some kind of sweet coconut scent, she was trying to drown out the bad smells with cheap ass scented candles. It wasn’t working very well.

The shiny knickknacks were all mostly shells, pebbles, old coins, things collected from the ground most likely, nothing in the room looked new, certainly not any of the few toys laying around. Clearly she had very little money. She was unkempt, her clothes were loose as though she’d lost weight and hadn’t been able to buy new ones, or they had simply never fit in the first place.

She was clearly living a miserable fucking life and didn’t want to take part in it any more.

Now THAT he could understand, but she had three wishes to use that could fix most of this, and she only wanted to use one to stop existing. Yeesh.

The girl had stood quietly as he surveyed, simply waiting patiently for him to speak. She clearly believed she had said all she needed to say. It was up to him now, what happened next.

Normally, The Genie would give a good wish a bad twist, but this... this was a bad wish. So now he would... have to... give it a good twist??

A good twist, huh. He grinned, yeah, he knew what he had to do.

“Okay girl, you ain’t never been born huh? Well...” he snapped his fingers.

The girl closed her eyes in expectation, a look of peace washing over her for a fraction of a second... before she opened her eyes again in confusion.

“Did... did it not work?” she asked quietly.

“No, it worked. You were never born,” The Genie grinned. “Your mumma had a C-section, no complications. It went pretty much perfect, so much so that it’s barely changed your life even a dent.”

The girl’s face twisted into a scowl.

“I thought your job was to make people’s lives worse, not make them the same.”

“Honey,” The Genie grinned, “if your life is so terrible that you want to die, then how exactly am I supposed to make it worse? I mean there are plenty of things I COULD take from you. You still have a roof over your head, you still have clothes on your back, you still have friends that care about you, but you already want to die, so what would be the point taking any of that away? It wouldn’t change anything really, would it?”

He leaned down into her face and smirked.

“So tell me girl, how ELSE exactly could you expect this to go?”

The girl looked frustrated, but not with him, no he’d seen this look a million times before. The look of someone who thought they’d outsmarted him, only to realise he’d played them like a fiddle anyway.

He didn’t quite get the same satisfaction this time though. Honestly what joy could he get from making a sad girl even sadder. Most people deserved the ironic twist they got from their wish, this girl just... damn. He really didn’t know WHAT to do with her.

Well, he supposed he would find out soon, she still had two more wishes.

She must have remembered that as well, since her face was crumpled up in concentration, gnawing her lip so hard an old scab had broken and bled.

“Okay,” she breathed, “Okay, so if I make a selfish wish, something bad will happen to me?” she asked. “So if I asked for something really big, something really terrible will happen to me.”

Yeah, The Genie knew where she was going with this. It wasn’t going to work though, that was the nature of Genie wishes after all, it didn’t matter how cleverly you crafted your wish, you would NEVER get what you wanted.

But what the hell could he do to her? Really? She wanted to DIE, how the heck could he make that worse? The most ironic thing he could think of was making her immortal, but that fell into his forbidden wish category so that was a bust.

The girl had apparently hit some kind of brain block trying to think up something big and selfish enough to kill her. She pulled at her hair and ripped open another sore on her lip.

The Genie really wasn’t enjoying this. At all. He hadn’t caused this, the wish he’d granted had changed nothing in her life, this misery wasn’t earned, and it felt completely undeserved. For him and for her.

The girl finally looked up at him, she looked miserable, and desperate.

“Just tell me what to wish.” she said. “Please just tell me what to wish to make me stop hurting everyone. I don’t care if I die, I don’t care if I fall into a coma, I don’t care if you drop me in the middle of nowhere where no one will ever find me. I just want my friends to stop being sad because of me, I want my parents to stop fighting because of me. I just want people to STOP being worried about me! I’m not worth it! I’m just sad all of the time and my friends only hang around me because they’re too nice to say they don’t like me.”

The Genie had only met one truly selfless person in his entire life, the one who never made a single wish, who buried him in the sand eons ago so nobody could abuse his power. It pissed him off at the time, leaving him bored and alone in the desert, he was young and brash and keen to reap destruction upon selfish people’s lives.

But he had seen some shit since then, and honestly after all the people he’d encountered and all the wishes he’d granted, he realised that that woman was the smarted human being he had ever met. He wished there were more like her, he was old now, and a thousand year nap in the desert sounded fucking amazing.

It was something special, that this girl made him think of that poor peasant woman, the only human he’d ever respected.

The only difference between this girl and that woman, was that this time the monster she wanted to bury was herself.

The Genie had always wished he could speak to that old peasant one more time, it pained him that she had been long dead by the time someone had unearthed his lamp, and even longer dead since he realised that it was respect, not fury, that he felt for her. If anyone deserved a free wish, to gain something without consequence, it was her.

And this girl reminded him of that selfless peasant, and THAT was deserving of something special.

His heart softened as he went to wipe a tear from the girl’s eye, she shifted away nervously as he raised his hand, so he lowered it again, instead crossing his arms across his chest.

“Look girl, I’ve got a deal for you, and don’t take this offer lightly I don’t do this for ANYONE, you hear me. This is a once in a lifetime deal.” his stare was hard, and serious.

The girl stared, unblinking, before nodding her head vigorously.

“Alright girl, here’s the deal. You got two wishes left right? Well, you give up one of those wishes and I’ll grant you one consequence free wish. You got that? You get one golden wish, and it CAN’T have anything to do with killing yourself. It has to be something that those kind friends of yours would sign off on. Got it?”

The girl looked less thrilled about the deal, but she was smart enough not to argue. She nodded before speaking.

“I just want to stop making everyone miserable. I just want to stop being a burden.”

The Genie nodded.

“Then make your wish.”

The girl took a few deep shuddering breaths. She didn’t make the wish right away, she was still clearly thinking about how to word what she wanted exactly. When it did come to her, it was exactly what The Genie wanted to hear.

With happy, hopeful tears in her eyes, she made her wish. Non-specific, freeform, easy to manipulate, but honest and wholesome and wonderfully hopeful.

“I wish everything would be okay.”

The Genie smiled, and snapped his fingers.

For a week nothing had changed, the girl rubbed the lamp over and over to no avail, her wishes had been spent and The Genie could no longer be summoned by her.

She should have known it was another trick, nothing had changed, just like with her first wish. She had given up a wish and gained nothing, it seemed she would just have to keep going as she had been. She kept pushing her friends away, she kept telling her teachers that she was ‘just fine’.

She kept curling up in her room when her parents fought over money, desperately trying to ignore the loud rumbling of her empty stomach as she convinced herself that she deserved to starve, that it was her fault her parents had no money. They had told her often enough that they never wanted her, that they couldn’t afford a kid. That she was lucky they let her sleep under their roof at all.

It was that night, exactly a week later, that something did change.

Someone had come to the front door. She could hear her parents shouting, something smashed, it was probably someone coming to collect money, might have been one of their dealers.

It didn’t sound like it though, the other voices were quiet and muffled, when the shouting started they raised volume but continued in a calm and professional tone. Footsteps approached her bedroom and she huddled up tighter as a head poked through her door.

It was the police, oh god it was the police.

The man poked his head back out again for a minute and murmured to someone outside in the hallway, before he opened the door further and knelt in front of her, hand gently outstretched.

“Are you Lisa?” he asked.

The girl nodded, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

“You’ve got some really good friends that care about you a whole lot Lisa. You’re gonna be staying with one of them for a little while.” the policeman smiled. “Everything is going to be okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can pry my happy endings from my cold dead hands.


End file.
